Alternative
by Silver Pard
Summary: Living with failure was never part of the plan.
1. Light

Alternative

In a small featureless room is hidden the world's greatest secret.

L looks through the thin wire mesh of the window and might feel pity for it, if he didn't regard it as entirely deserving of the fate that has befallen it.

Statue still, eyes empty and unfocussed, Kira smiles.

––

Every newspaper spread the story; a man and a woman, names unknown, tried in private hearings and convicted of being Kira and the second Kira. The woman, the second Kira, sentenced to the gentle punishment of life imprisonment.

(Light made it excruciatingly clear to L that if he sentenced Misa to death he also sentenced himself. Sometimes he wishes he hadn't said anything. Sometimes he wonders how she is.)

The man, Kira, sentenced to death.

(What a beautiful lie for the ignorant masses, and how he wishes he had been.)

When it came down to it, Light chose his friend, chose L over his Justice. He knew he should have listened to Kira when L told him that he would not be executed but sent to a psychiatric hospital.

(Welcome to Arkham, the nurse who greeted him had joked, smiling, and Light had automatically started revising his escape plans to accommodate the fact that he was somewhere in America without papers or passport, and it took him three interminable weeks to stop moving stop talking stop planning helplessly.)

At his secret trial that did not happen Aizawa said, may god have mercy on your soul.

At his secret trial that did not happen (at least, not like the world imagines) Light laughed until he was gasping for air and the task force looked more fearful than infuriated.

Anything was better than screaming.

––

Strychnine is a poison. It has no colour and is a crystalline powder with a bitter taste – one of the most bitter in the world. It is a component of the dog button plant that has fruit that resembles small oranges. The ash grey seeds contain the most poison. Ingested, the first symptoms are a stiff neck and face, followed by muscular convulsions and eventual death through asphyxia or sheer exhaustion.

Defeat, Light thinks, is strychnine.

Kira is not defeated. Light conceded the main game, certainly, but Kira is still playing, petty and pointless as the field now open to him is. _Light_ has been defeated, has fallen and broken. Light is only human.

The bitter poison taste is merely – merely! – humiliation, and there is an antidote.

Kira will not let the taste of humiliation become the taste of defeat.

––

The room is ten paces, wall to wall. There is a bed, a toilet and a sink. Everything is white, white, white, and once he could have described everything to the last minuscule detail, from the size of the single window in the north wall to the number of potential tools to be culled from the bolted furniture.

There's no point, so he doesn't. He catalogues everything anyway because he can't stop.

He is not tortured. The antiseptic smell of the medical wing provokes no learned response. He feels no fear when he hears the distinctive clicking of the doctor's shoes against the shining scrubbed floor. His scars, fresh and pink against his slowly whitening skin, are not made with surgical instruments.

Kira sits cross-legged on Light's bed, head bowed as it never was even when he confessed, eyes half-closed as he contemplates the thin sliver of monotonous non-colour beneath his eyelids. He thinks fleetingly of L, so self-righteously white.

(It will not be long until I send you to die.)

But it is, because the game is over for Yagami Light, and yet he is still alive, withering away anonymously in the indifferent care of L's chosen institution. Death he could handle, he expected, but this? Oh, L knows just how to hurt. Kira would admire it, if it weren't him, if he wasn't watching his own sanity splinter as the universe shrinks around him to four blank walls, the world leached of everything that made it worth killing for.

This wasn't how the game was supposed to go, they'd both known from the beginning that the stakes for the unwary, the foolish misstep, was death.

Living with failure was not part of the plan.

––

"Why?" L says, black eyes like clenched fists, ready to hit. His hands are open. "Why did you give up?"

Light laughs open-mouthed and breathless. He closes his eyes for a second, a flicker of thin skin across his deadly gaze, lifts his head and smiles Kira's razor-bladed smile and mouths the word why back to L, over and over. L's open hands close and clench.

_Idiot_, Kira says pleasantly.

_Of course you don't know_, Light says, the words tinged seven different colours (hate, anger, grief, amusement, acceptance, exasperation and something he no longer admits to feeling).

"Tell me," he hisses. It's hard to believe Light ever thought L's eyes were black, he decides. L's eyes are a thunderstorm.

_Just who do you think you are_, Light asks incredulously.

_God_, answers Kira, and circles his scarred wrist to see if his action is replicated. It is.

"You won't ever get out of here," L says after a moment. The silence would be oppressive to anyone else, but they are both adept at carrying the weight and silence of secrets.

_Are you threatening me? _Kira wonders, and lets the question show fleetingly on his face.

_What else can you possibly do to me?_ Light says. Light thinks that defeat is bitter on his tongue, defeat is strychnine, because L is a person to Light, not an object an obstacle an opposing chess player, and what L has done to Light is unforgivable. What L has done to Kira was all they expected.

L takes a breath. Light wonders if it shakes with rage or frustration. "Why are you still here," L asks, and it takes Light an embarrassingly long minute to realise he's talking to Ryuk.

"Who, me?" Ryuk flips himself the right way up and leans close enough to L that he could probably see himself reflected in Ryuk's yellow eyes. "It's the rules. The shinigami must stay with the owner of the notebook until the day they die."

"But the notebook is in my possession," L demurs, and Light, staring blankly at the long line of his throat, smiles darkly.

"You're just looking after it," Ryuk says. "Light's still the owner. There are three ways you could take ownership, though, if you want it so badly." He reaches out, places a clawed finger an inch away from L's eye. "Don't see why you would, you can still use it to kill without owning it."

"How?"

"Weeeell. If you kill Light with the notebook, you become the owner. If Light dies and you're the first to touch the notebook afterwards, you become the owner. And if Light hasn't touched it or killed anyone with it in 490 days he'll lose his memory and his ownership and if you're the first to touch it you become the owner. There."

They stare at each other for a long time, Ryuk and L, and Light stares at L's throat and imagines the blood throbbing there.

"Don't even think about killing Light." Ryuk warns. "I've already promised; his name is going down in my notebook."

Light detects something a little like anger in L's expression, but the thought is ludicrous so he drops his gaze once more and tries to remember the names of the muscles in the neck. "I would never," he says, and Light thinks he might hate L then.

"No?" Ryuk says with surprise too genuine to be real. "You'd be doing him a favour. Oh wait…" he sniggers, closing his clawed hands about L's head, bringing his face in close enough to see the tiny creases in Ryuk's leathery skin. "…that's why you won't, isn't it?" he throws his head back and laughs, flinging L away like rotten apple core.

L looks over to Light, and if Light concentrates his can see the tiny red lines where Ryuk has held him, tiny red lines that begin to waver and slip, little droplets of blood beginning their slow descent from Ryuk's claw marks down L's face to pool in the hollow of his throat.

Light closes his eyes and shuts L out of the world. After two hours of stillness, L leaves.

––

How to Use: The person in possession of the DEATH NOTE is possessed by a god of death, its original owner, until they die.

Light is still the owner of two notebooks, one buried beneath the earth with a corner missing, Kira's defiant _fuck you_ to the part of him that had been so foolish as to give himself up to L's non-existent mercy.

On full-moon nights the room is lit up eerie and blue and empty like his life. Kira buries himself deep. Light twitches helplessly, aborted movements spilling from him like apples from trees, like poison from a snake's fangs. But patient K7193 is catatonic.

Ryuk wraps his elongated limbs around him. Light closes his eyes and presses himself tight against the centre of the universe, breathing deeply the scent of spoiled fruit and dry bone, dust and distance.

Face buried against a shinigami's shoulder, Light dreams Kira's dreams.

––

Kira knows the rules of the Death Note inside out, forwards, backwards, upside down and every which way he can possibly imagine. Kira knows the Death Note intimately. For Kira, sex is the palest echo of the stroke of pen against paper, his lover's heartbeat a poor imitation of a clock's ticking – his mind whites out with the sound of bodies hitting the floor.

Kira is not human. That is why he is caged like an animal. Kira is not a Death God. There is nothing of Ryuk's indifference in Kira's killing.

Kira dreams of scenarios, possibilities, things that could happen if his mind were not spiralling down into places that served no purpose. Kira dreams of the wind in his overlong hair, the earth beneath his bare feet. Kira dreams of the Note in his hands, the smell of paper that feels like skin as he hugs it to him as he would once have held his little sister after a nightmare. Kira does not dream of pens but daggers – needles – quills – names written with blood that smells like L, like sugar and strychnine.

Name after name after name. The human body contains nine pints of blood.

Alone in the ashes of the world he would laugh with Ryuk. What he would do with L he still doesn't know. He hasn't yet been able to conceive of something ruthless enough to equal what L did with his own victory. But he is the human a shinigami could take lessons from. He's seen L in action. He'll think of something.

––

L returns.

_I hate you_, Light thinks, staring at him through the wired mesh of the door's window. The words are unfamiliar; they taste like ink and fit in his mouth in his mind like a rotten apple core, they flash notebook-black across the inside of his mind, his labyrinthine mind that is unravelling day by day.

_I hate you_, Light thinks. _Light_ thinks it. Kira merely nods in agreement. The part of him he didn't know he had until he met L flickers, dims, goes out. For the first time he understands that Kira has nothing – _nothing_ – on him when it comes to hating L.

"I just want to understand," L lies.

Light shakes his head, and it hurts, the twist of muscles, the ache of his unbalanced mind filling his heavy skull. He doesn't say anything. There aren't any words. Light's breathtaking silver tongue, L might as well have cut it out when he sentenced him to this institution instead of killing him as the rules of their game demanded. There wasn't supposed to be an alternative.

L broke the rules, and this is one of the few things Kira has left to deny him.

L's hands, curled tight and furious, skin stretched white over bone. "Talk to me," he demands, and Light says nothing, stares at him blankly as if he wonders what this emotional creature has to do with him and his little world. "Damn you, Kira," L whispers, spinning away and walking at a pace one step removed from a run, and Light finds the emotional reserves to be insulted that he thinks Kira is the only part of Light capable of petty resistance.

"Damn you, L," Light whispers when L is long gone, but his voice is raspy and broken and less than a whisper. Light who had a liar's voice, slick and beautiful and oh-so charming. He couldn't stand for L to hear it and know for certain just how much damage he has done.

Ryuk cackles softly from where he sits cross-legged on the ceiling. Light's eyes drift to the notebook strapped to his leg. Ryuk follows his gaze and laughs louder. _Too quick_, he tells Ryuk with the tilt of his head, the loosening of his body, the blankness of his eyes. _Far too quick_.

Apple-starved eyes meet dead human ones in silent accord.

––

There was a prince, a little night god. And he had everything. He was denied nothing. Even Death bowed to him.

But there was one thing the prince did not have, and one person who did not bow.

Entranced, the prince drew closer and closer. Too close. The man who would not bow and held the only thing the prince did not have, turned, thrust a knife into his heart.

Down fell the prince.

––

Time passes, time crawls, time becomes something to endure. Kira remembers how it stretched out before him, so finite, something he had to outrun in his attempt to reshape the imperfect world to his high standards.

Ryuk twists, turns, whines with black lips drawn back from needle sharp teeth. "Apple," he pants against Light's ear as he reaches out and scores a fresh set of lines down Light's body, crossways from left shoulder to right hip.

Light pretends not to know that Ryuk is well over his apple withdrawal, that he is in that halfway stage where he is 'clean' of his addiction, but would fall if the opportunity were available.

Ryuk pretends not to know that Light arcs into his touch, desperate for the reassurance that someone other than himself exists in this drab white world.

Light pretends not to know Ryuk enjoys touching him, scarring him – seeing his reaction, the way his body will put itself back together slowly with infinite patience. It's not as interesting as before, naturally, but there's no longer a visible outlet for Ryuk to watch Light's vast death-obsessed mind through.

Ryuk pretends he does it to see how Light can hurt and heal, not to keep Light from sinking so far into himself he can no longer find his way out again.

The nurses treat his injuries but no notes are made regarding self-mutilation. They like Patient K7193, who was polite and charming, if withdrawn, when he was first admitted. Anna, the nurse he last spoke to, made them swear not to write what he dreams of. None of them want him to get the wrong kind of attention from the directors, poor lamb, and medical records have an odd tendency to go missing anyway.

––

"I don't know why I keep coming here," L admits on his seventh visit.

Kira thinks L is being deliberately obtuse. Of course he knows why he comes – he keeps coming back to Light because his victory is empty, because Light gave up the game, and he needs to crack Light's bones between his teeth and suck the marrow before he'll be even remotely satisfied with his 'win'.

"Why won't you talk?"

Kira smiles, a gentle curving of the lips that ought to belong to Light, and his eyes glitter. Desperation chases helplessness chases fury across L's blank face.

"Light."

Light hasn't been around for a while. The blank walls, the bolted furniture. His mind running faster and faster to nowhere, spinning round and round, cataloguing everything to no purpose simply for something to do. Always the knowledge that L has done this to him is buried in his skin like the glass shards of his sanity.

Kira can take it. L is nothing personal to Kira. Kira thrives on the challenge, the feel of L's mind threaded in things that have no relevance, the feel of L's mind, trying to break him. Kira is stronger than Light.

The one time he wasn't -

Well. Look where he was.

"I-" L begins and then closes his mouth and doesn't finish.

_Are you sorry?_ wonders Kira, smelling weakness like a shark smells blood. He turns away so Light doesn't see it.

––

Light had never been especially connected to his body. He took care of it the way he would anything, groomed it to sleek empty perfection because his body too was a weapon in his arsenal, just as his mind was, and it made no sense to sharpen one and let the superficial, socially important other rust. His looks were something he used, his body merely an organic machine he could manipulate according to his will, the same as he would use a calculator, a computer. It was just something to keep his vast mind in.

Now he cannot escape it. He feels the heaviness of his limbs, feels his skin like paper, his blood like ink, his scars like calligraphy. His eyes like empty mirrors.

His formerly beautiful, terribly perfect human body. He cannot escape it. He catalogues it instead, the one thing in his stable unchanging world that is capable of variation. Fascinating, the bones beneath his skin, how starkly visible they now are; fascinating, the texture of his skin, the ache in his atrophying muscles, the winding scars made by a creature that epitomises all Light once was. Fascinating, depressing, there's little difference.

_How thou art fallen, O Lucifer son of the morning!_

Light. Written with the kanji for night, god and moon. Light, pronounced like the English word that has nineteen meanings and countless synonyms.

The suns bursting into glorious furious life within his hands. His shadow deepening darkening under his own brilliant presence.

L has taken colour and texture and sound and taste from him, his perfect world ashes in his mouth. Everything is so flat, everything is so empty, it's all so _grey_, and when he was killing the world was bright and brilliant, and how could he possibly – why did Light choose L over that?

––

This is the answer to the fall: the one thing the prince did not have was love. The person who would not bow was L.

There. Wasn't that obvious?

––

When Ryuk leaves early one morning, Light feels himself break – finally – feels himself splinter, shatter. At midday he stops hoping and weeps silently and helplessly, face pressed against the cold wall, hating himself for the scalding tears against his cheeks.

Kira, god of the new world, same as the old.

Ryuk returns in the middle of the night (a night, because Light couldn't tell how much time had passed), several sheets of innocuous lined paper clutched in his fist. "Thought you might like at least part of your property back," he says innocently as Light laughs until he begins to choke, bringing up thin bile that burns his throat.

He wonders if Ryuk's sudden exploitation of loopholes has anything to do with the fact that nearly 490 days have passed since he last touched either notebook, last killed, that he is two weeks away from losing his ownership and his memory.

And how that would destroy him, to wake confined and helpless and confused, completely unknowing of why he was caged, to wake and not realise just how much further he could fall with unwitting protests to everyone who passed of his innocence, of not understanding, of not being _Kira_, who died over a year ago.

He thinks of L, of the notebook still under his lock and key, remembers Misa, and might laugh if only he could remember why.

"Do something interesting," Ryuk says, grin widening impossibly as he offers a pen.

––

Light's dreams are filled with colour, with a vividness that is so unlike the place he inhabits when awake. This is how he knows he's dreaming Kira. Kira dreams in colour; Light's dreams are whisper-thin and faded sepia. They crumble before Kira's vibrancy, just as his life did.

––

"Time's nearly up, Light." Ryuk says quietly, and Light blinks once to acknowledge Ryuk's statement. He's kept careful count of the days, they both have.

How to Use XII: If you lose the DEATH NOTE or have it stolen, you will lose its ownership unless you retrieve it within 490 days.

"What do you think they'll do?" Ryuk wonders, and pulls a loose feather from his shoulder. "When they discover they have Kira in their institution? That's the first thing you'll do, right? Start protesting that you're not Kira? And…" he adds, twisting the knife in deeper, like it _matters_ any more, "…it'll be true, won't it? You won't be Kira then, you'll just be Light, punished for something you didn't do, broken into itsy little pieces for something you don't remember."

"It's almost shinigami-like in its cruelty," Light agrees in his broken voice, eyebrows rising, smile twisting, body centring to express approval of L's unmitigated cruelty.

"Nah, it's _human_," Ryuk points out. "All we do is kill you."

"That's right," Light sighs. "When will you do it, Ryuk?"

Ryuk does not ask what Light is talking about. He unbuckles the notebook strapped to his waist and opens it, turns it around to show its crisp pages to Light, careful not to accidentally touch him with it.

_Yagami Light_, it says, _heart attack. Dies on the 28__th__ of February 2006._

––

He presses pen to paper and the world is full of light.


	2. Soichiro

A/N: For Ramis Hunroll, who thought it might be cool to see it from L or Soichiro's point of view.

* * *

Yagami Soichiro is Chief of Police. Yagami Soichiro is a loving husband, a dedicated career cop. Yagami Soichiro is the father of a nineteen-year-old mass-murderer.

Ever since Light was little he was always so brilliant, so bright, so very perfect. Everything came naturally to him. Murder, it seems, is just another of Light's many talents.

––

Sachiko named Light. Soichiro speaks English proficiently, but not fluently. He knew enough English to be supportive of his wife's decision to name their first child Light, but not enough that when he starts learning it with renewed dedication in the wake of his son's conviction the discovery of the western devil doesn't leave him with chills.

(_Lux_, _lucis_, "light", _ferre_, "to bear, to bring" Lucifer the light-bringer – the devil comes in the guise of an angel, the devil comes clothed in Light.)

Sometimes Soichiro wonders if he always knew. Sayu was always his favourite.

And then he wonders if that isn't why. Maybe Light was always aware of that favouritism, maybe Light saw Kira as a way of striking at his father for not loving him enough, for not caring enough about his son's activities.

_I'm certain Sayu isn't Kira_, he remembers telling L in the hospital. It was only when he faced Light across an interrogation room table and Light told him with mild reproof that he always knew that Soichiro realised what Light and L had known the moment he said it – he would never say _I'm certain _Light _isn't Kira._

Kira is too cold-blooded to care, he tells himself, but he hugs Sayu less and less. He can't help looking for slivers of Light in his daughter's face, he can't help looking for the absence that was in Light that means he can claim to be the father of the greatest single killer on the face of the earth.

––

"I have something to tell you," Light had said, and Soichiro remembers how he had fidgeted, the minute changes of expression that had flickered over his face, frowns and smirks and scowls and how Light's hands had clenched, a piece of paper clutched in one of them like a lifeline. He remembers the steadying breath he sucked in through gritted teeth. He remembers the sudden serenity that had covered his son's face like veil, he remembers knowing before Light opened his mouth what he was about to say.

Soichiro has heard of knowledge being compared to the bite of an apple's flesh, to the taste of honey, the flicker of candle flame. Soichiro will always confuse knowledge and revelation, both of them a fist in the gut.

"I am Kira," his son had declared serenely, face impassive--

How unstable the world was, falling apart at the seams in a moment, in three words.

Under his outward horror, his shock and rage and fear, Soichiro wondered why he wasn't more surprised. He wondered if the Kira case had already sapped all of his strength. He wondered if he'd seen more of Light than he realised in the days before his confession, the conflict on his face the closer and closer L shuffled blindly towards his death.

"I am Kira," Light had said, and in the moment Soichiro had realised he didn't know his son at all.

––

A fist, a car crash in slow motion.

When he watched L and Light together, it struck Soichiro that his son was more intelligent than he would ever be, that his son saw the world in a completely different way, so far apart from Soichiro's own way of thinking that the only person who could understand it was L.

_L._ As in, the world's greatest detective. As in, the shadowy faceless mastermind that shuffled international police agencies around as if they were chess pieces.

L's cool-headed cold-blooded approach to investigating had shaken the foundations of Soichiro's understanding of his job, had tilted the world by degrees. For L's desire to find Kira he had turned against his family, had allowed cameras to be installed in his home and defined himself as a policeman above all.

Soichiro thought he had never met anyone like L, and to see his son greet him, stand next to him, speak opposite him and match him, query for query, move for move –

A fist to his worn heart, the tang of an apple's flesh against his tongue. How could he know his own son so little? How could he not have known this side of Light? Watching Light's mind dance with L's – L, _the world's greatest detective_ – how could he possibly _be_ so blind? How could he not see just how brilliant his boy was?

Maybe he shouldn't have been surprised at all that his son turned out to be Kira.

––

The first time Soichiro visits Light in the asylum he screams and shouts at him for half an hour, voice cracking, body shaking, and Light stares through him as if he doesn't exist.

When Light was a child – and he's still so very young, this beautiful murderous boy – Soichiro had never yelled at him, he had always expressed his disappointment in an even tone, and Light had always responded automatically with shame and hurt, had ducked his head with glittering tears in his eyes and had always taken care to never do whatever it was again.

Light stares through him like he doesn't exist and he wonders if all the contrite expressions were merely that – expressions, nothing to do with what was running through his head, just something Light had learned to do to deflect attention and allow him to proceed with his own things. Perhaps all he is seeing at last is what Light truly thinks of him, what Kira truly thinks of him – of everyone – that he is a nonentity, nothing, less than nothing.

Soichiro thinks that perhaps he wants that to be it, because surely his son can't—_can't_ be like anyone else, surely there must be something _wrong_ with Light that he could kill hundreds, _thousands_ of people without blinking. Because if there is nothing wrong with Light then Soichiro must have done something wrong, there must be something wrong in how he raised him, how he taught him. Something, somewhere, just hadn't connected, hadn't fired, and he hadn't noticed and all Kira's victims were his fault for not being the father he should have been.

He thinks that anyway.

Perhaps he shouldn't have praised him so often, so loudly – but he had been so proud of his son, how could he not? Perhaps he shouldn't have let Light work on his cases – but he'd wanted his only son to follow in his footsteps. Perhaps he shouldn't have spent so much time at work, so much time away from his family – but he'd wanted his family to have everything, and everything comes with work (except for Light, for whom everything came with nothing).

He's looked at it over and over from every angle he can think of and he still doesn't know where he went wrong.

Then he thinks of Sayu, and Sayu is not a murderer.

The shinigami crouches behind Light, strokes its clawed fingers gently through Light's uncombed too-long hair and Soichiro can feel his stomach heaving as he watches it stare at him over Light's shoulder, poisonous yellow eyes glowing in its grinning face.

He can't tell the difference between the shinigami's frozen face and his son's.

Light's eyes half-close at the creature's rhythmic touch, and Soichiro thinks _this is Kira, this has to be Kira_, because this can't be his son, this blank-faced caged creature that looks too much like the Death God next to it.

Soichiro closes his eyes and can still see his son aged five, can still remember how round and soft his cheeks were pressed against his shoulder as he carried him upstairs to bed, can still remember his eyes as bright and honey-brown, full of innocence, so warm and alive.

Soichiro opens his eyes, and he sees afresh how the skin of the boy in front of him is stretched taut over bone, the shadows in his sharply elegant face, the white scars snaking beneath the loose institutional clothing. He sees with fresh eyes and he sees a monster.

––

He runs. What else can he do?

––

A fist, a car crash revelation.

From the moment Light and L fell into orbit around each other, Soichiro ceased to exist as anything except periphery. Sachiko and Sayu ceased to exist at all.

Click.

Puzzle pieces falling into place.

Tick. Tock. Yagami Soichiro was a toy, a pawn, a sketchy, easily manipulated set piece. Forty seconds and his life could have been over, his own son would have killed him without a blink.

King and King took their sides, and Soichiro was just a pawn and now that the game is over he sees that either of them could – would – have swept him off the board if it served them.

It wasn't for his father that Light stopped himself killing. Soichiro wanted to believe the best of his son, but he's not stupid.

He remembers the way Light looked at L near the end when he thought nobody was looking, the way he half-frowned, half-smiled like he didn't know which he wanted to do. He remembers how L had stared at Light from the very beginning, before there was the slightest hint at all that his son was anything other than a very intelligent young man.

He knows that L keeps going back to Light, demanding answers he knows he won't get. He knows in his heart that Light will lift his head and face L, as surely as he knows he will never respond to him. Even now Yagami Soichiro is a lost note in the margins of his son's life.

No. He can't think of Kira as his son, he can't think of Kira as Light. If he did, he'd take the gun he once used to fake an execution, put it to his head and pull the trigger.

––

"When's Light coming home?" Sayu asks, knowing the answer is _never_.

––

Sachiko tells him to give Light her love, and he wonders at her ability to forgive. It takes him time to understand that she doesn't think there is anything to forgive. Sachiko doesn't take it as a personal affront that Light became a mass murderer, she doesn't consider Light's fall to be her fault, or his, or the fault of their family.

Soichiro is a police officer; Kira is a criminal. He doesn't understand.

Sachiko has never chosen a job over her family. She has never doubted that she did the best she could. Sachiko is a mother. Sachiko believes in the gods. He told her about the shinigami and she didn't laugh, she didn't look at him like he was crazy. She'd looked hurt and accepting, as if sad that something she'd always known should have become fact in such a way.

She sighs, her body comfortable and familiar pressed against his, and whispers, "How could anyone – even our Light – possibly stand against that?"

Our Light. As if their little boy is still the centre of the universe, as if he can still say the words without spitting.

He tries to tell her – Kira chose to do everything he did. He tells her the shinigami never did anything to prompt Kira one way or the other, merely watched, and she looks at him like she can't understand how a former detective superintendent could be so slow.

"Think," she says, her arms around him, her head against his shoulder. When Light was a baby he was rarely out of her arms. No. Don't think about Light. "If Light had never touched that 'Death Note' –" she uses the English words, careful, precise, "—would he have ever killed anyone?"

"_No_," Soichiro says bitterly but too fast, because someone like Kira – surely that sort of emptiness leaves its mark, surely that sort of emptiness would have to express itself somehow.

"No," Sachiko agrees as if she doesn't hear his doubt. "Something like that isn't meant to be in human hands. Of course it would warp anyone unlucky enough to touch it. Death belongs to the gods. Anyone could have become Kira with that sort of power in their hands."

No, not anyone. Just Light. _There have been humans with Death Notes before_, the shinigami – _Ryuk_ – had said as Soichiro crumpled and smoothed out the ragged piece of paper in his hand, over and over, trying to ignore everyone else in the room. _But never anyone like Light_. Never.

He wants to shake Sachiko, he wants to tell her how _proud_ that creature had sounded, how absolutely _delighted_ he was with their son – _their son!_ Such a quick study, such a fascinating, entertaining human who spun vast webs purely, it felt, for its amusement.

He wants to tell Sachiko how sick he felt, listening to Light calmly recite Kira's crimes, he wants to tell her how he talked of using people as lab rats, his dismissal of their lives as nothing compared to his delight at discovering the extent of the Death Note's abilities. He wants to tell her about the clown-faced shinigami, the way it looked at Light, the way it talked to him, about him, so pleased, so goddamn thrilled, telling them with pride that he'd never seen a human like him, that Kira surpassed even a _Death God_ in scope and ability.

Light could have tricked a shinigami into killing herself for him. He could have killed a god and L in the same moment, and he planned it all months in advance. That's the sort of creature their son is.

He doesn't have to say anything. She sees it in his eyes and shakes her head again and cups his face with her hands – worn, tired, years of the constant, never-ending work of a mother has made them raw – he wonders when it happened that his homebody wife surpassed a deputy chief of police in understanding and wisdom. "That Light took it so far – you remember how it was, even when he was a little boy," she says simply. "Anything Light did was always going to be bigger, brighter than anything and anyone else. It's not his fault that this ended up being it, just terrible luck."

_He's a murderer, _Soichiro thinks.

_He's my son_, Sachiko's eyes say. "I won't let Kira take Light from me," she whispers. "Give him my love."

––

He knows 'K7193' isn't even aware of his presence. He doesn't need to be a doctor to know that there's nothing going on behind those blank eyes. He can't tell if he's even moved since the last time he was here.

"Your mother sends her love," he tells Light.

It's getting harder and harder to think of the thing in the room as Light. Everything soft about him is being pared away, everything gentle and human, everything he could see his little boy in. Looking at the sharp angles of this stranger's cadaverous face he remembers that the only companionship this broken thing has is a shinigami.

_This is my son_, he thinks with shock, with pain, with horror.

––

Light grew up so fast – too fast? – always calmer, more mature than the other children his age. He was just so _perfect_, sometimes Soichiro couldn't believe Light wasn't something he'd dreamed up, that any moment he'd wake up with his hand on Sachiko's pregnant belly, and they'd go back to arguing about names and whether they were having a boy or a girl. Sometimes he felt as if someone had mistakenly slotted Light into their life, placed this little glowing sun in the middle of their tiny family and that was why they drifted in orbit around him, never daring to really _know_ him, because planets can't touch the sun without being destroyed.

(And hasn't Kira destroyed their family? Hasn't knowing the heart of the sun turned everything to ash?)

After a year in Rooksgrove he can no longer mistake Kira for Light. It's like the place is eating him alive, or at least, eating Light and leaving the stubborn bones of Kira behind.

He didn't know he had enough left in him for his heart to shrink with pity.

He wonders if L sees this as clearly as he does, he wonders what L thinks as he looks at this mockery of the elegant effortless genius he knew. He wonders if it strikes L like a knife blow, he wonders if every time he visits he staggers away and vomits in the plain hospital washroom. He wonders if, like Light, L cares at all.

L has always been clear that he is three steps from Kira himself – childish and hating to lose – and maybe L feels nothing watching his 'friend' unravel, just as Light would have felt nothing watching L tumble from his chair, heart stuttering to a halt in his chest.

He wonders if L knows the cruelty he is doing and thinks Light deserves it for spoiling the intricate game between Kira and L. He wonders whether L has done this because he thinks Light doesn't deserve a quick death or because Light didn't give him victory over Kira on his own merits.

(But L would have died before that happened; they all heard Light's matter-of-fact recital. Light would have held him as he died and cried – maybe even screamed – while smiling like a demon.)

How tightly wrapped in each other they were, and they could watch each other die without flinching, and Soichiro just couldn't understand – that sort of connection, that sort of mental understanding, surely it came with an emotional connection? Surely you couldn't wrap yourself so completely around another person and not care for them in the slightest?

Perhaps this _is_ L's idea of caring, and the thought is so wrong, so horrific it makes him want to be violently ill.

Why couldn't you kill him, he wants to say, to beg, why couldn't you finish this, why do you have to rub my nose in the fact that the greatest monster I've ever hunted is my own flesh and blood? Why couldn't you stop thinking of yourself and your precious _game_ for once and do the right thing?

_This is my son_, he thinks, numbly.

––

He supposes he should be grateful that L cared enough – for Light, for Soichiro, for their family, one of the three – that he insisted the knowledge of Kira's true identity never left the tight circle of those who were there when he confessed.

He thinks L did it because he couldn't stand the thought of other people looking at Light and knowing as he did the monster behind the face. He thinks L did it because he didn't want to share Kira – the truth of Kira – with anyone. He thinks L keeps Kira locked in a little room unknown to anyone because he wants to keep the unfathomable connection between them even though the game of catch me if you can is over.

He thinks L is a monster; he thinks Kira and L are equal in their monstrosity, in their involuntary abnormality. The glimpses of what they might have been are the corona around a permanently eclipsed sun.

Soichiro always envied his son, just a little. He knew he shouldn't have been ashamed every time he watched Light doing something perfect first time after he'd spent hours on it, but there had always been a faint humiliation hiding in his pride. He thinks of Light now, a lingering shadow in an empty room, and he thinks of L, staring through the window at him, having sentenced his 'first ever friend' to something even worse than the death his friend promised him –

If that is genius, Soichiro thinks, he is glad to be nothing special.

L keeps Kira locked in a box. Kira keeps himself locked in his head. Stalemate. And the shinigami who started it all, doing nothing, just watching. Just laughing, like the destruction of Soichiro's family is the most entertaining thing he's ever seen.

He goes home and weeps drunkenly standing alone in his dead son's room.


	3. L

A/N: For Snoaz and Aloony, who will hopefully be pleased at what their requests brought them.

* * *

L does not miss Yagami Light. Any insinuation towards such a thing is a blatant and ridiculous lie. Light is just another murderer he has put away, and L feels nothing when it comes to murderers. Why should Light be different from the thousand others he has seen tried and convicted?

"_Let's catch Kira together."_

It isn't the first time someone he's worked with turned out to be someone he was hunting. The difference was he'd known from the start, had actually invited him himself.

"_Light-kun is my very first friend."_

He lied, of course. L has no friends, nothing that might compromise his judgement, might mean he has to reassess the single-minded devotion of his life to justice. (Ryuzaki had friends though. But Ryuzaki-Light's-Friend was put away with the Kira case, folded up like a suit that no longer fitted.)

He knew from the start that Light was Kira. He could give a dozen explanations, all of them lies, every one specific to a potential questioner. The truth is, L can't say, even to himself, exactly what made it so clear. Light might as well have worn a halo, it was just so perfectly obvious, it was just _there_, standing behind his every move, his every smile, behind even the most innocuous comment.

Kira was as clear to L as his reflection in the mirror, and L – L cared about him anyway.

He'd slept beside Kira, watched him dream, held him when he woke from nightmares. Kira knew how to make his tea exactly the way he liked it, and knew when he wanted western or eastern style sweets. He knew when L needed space to think and when he wanted to talk out a theory.

L won't tell anyone about that, about how he could turn to Kira and talk and know that he _understood_, even when he pretended not to. Because if he did, he'd have to see the disbelief and incomprehension on their faces, and accept that he'll never have that again.

He goes back to demonstrate his superiority over a beaten foe, that's all. (Lie)

To say to Kira, 'you don't hold any more secrets from me' (Lie)

L does not miss Light. But he does grieve for him. (Truth)

––

It was raining the day Light destroyed himself. L doesn't think about heaven, weeping for the waste.

He knew what Light was going to say long before even Light knew for sure he was going to say it, and as much as he wanted the truth, he didn't want to hear it. He wanted to _see_ it, wanted to have Light's face before him and see the shock when L finally, finally managed to corner him where he couldn't escape.

("Listen," Light said, expression bleak in the half-light L insisted upon working in at night. "I'm trying to tell you something.")

When L allows himself to linger on it, pick at the memory like a half-healed wound, ripping out stitches over and over again, he wants to hit Light, he wants to break his pretty face, wants to make him scream and beg and weep and grovel, wants Light to know just what L could have done to him to extract those words from him, see how pointless the sorry little confession was. If he'd wanted _words _he'd already have got them.

("Unless it has to do with cheesecake, I'm not interested, Light-kun."

"L, this is far more important than _cheesecake_."

"Nothing is more important than cheesecake," L said, and Light groaned with frustration, slender hands in his hair, watch glinting on his wrist like a guilty secret.

"Will you just _listen to me?_"

"_No_." L said, watching Kira bare his teeth in fury, watching Kira's hands clench into fists, watching Kira's fury sweep Light's confession away like it was written on sand.)

If he ever hoped that Light's lost memories of Kira might be permanent, it's not something he can recall.

("Do you ever dream, Ryuzaki?"

"No.")

The realisation that he was going to lose Light was in the way he'd screamed, clutching the Death Note like a drowning man clinging to rock, the way his hair suddenly covered his darkened eyes again, the smiles that were no longer smiles but smirks, the way his every move suddenly gained the double triple quadruple meanings they'd had before he'd cast away his pride. It was the way he stood, the way he frowned with distant eyes, like something more important than his continued freedom was going on somewhere else, inside his head, it was the way he held a strip of paper crumpled in his fist. (Lie)

He'd always known he was going to lose Light and it was only the night after Higuchi's death – watching him sleep, his expression cold even in his dreams now – that L realised he was mistaken: he'd already lost Light and he hadn't even known until it was too late. (Truth)

Secretly, he'd thought he'd know, the moment Kira took Light back. He thought he would have some warning (_this pride_--) he thought that there might be some chance, some opportunity--

To do what? How was he meant to guard against something he could not see, did not know or understand? How was he to know Kira hid inside a book, waiting to seep in through Light's skin like poison?

What was Yagami worth anyway? Nothing. Kira was what L wanted, the reason he was in Japan, tangled up with Light in the first place. He wanted to win against the first Kira, the true Kira, the Kira who hid little taunts inside suicide notes, the Kira who knew exactly how to play the game and played it brilliantly. There was no satisfaction in having Higuchi as Kira and Amane could only ever be the second. But Kira-Light, who had proven to be the best challenge of his career – the truth of that was worth anything.

Even Light, poor innocent fool, who might have been L's equal, if the Death Note hadn't fallen at his feet.

("I wanted you to be Kira.")

He wasn't surprised in the slightest when Light announced what L had always known. To be exact: he wasn't surprised by the actual announcement, only that it was announced at all.

"_I am Kira."_

You bastard. How dare you just _tell_ _me_ like I couldn't figure it out on my own. How dare you take this victory from me. How dare you ruin this.

Light-kun. Don't you understand what I'm going to do to you?

––

The first time L goes to see Light, he doesn't. He thought he was ready, he thought he knew what to expect, and he did – and did not. He expected Light to be changed, but not what he changed into. He expected the difference, but not how it would affect him.

L has always known how to break Light.

Day eight of his confinement, Light announced that put together the walls divided into 130 sections, something he'd worked out just to have something to do.

Day nine, L could visibly see Light's frustration, that incredible mind desperately seeking something to occupy it, and finding nothing but L demanding a confession. They would trade verbal barbs that were slowly losing coherency on Light's part until exhaustion took its toll and Light would sleep fitfully until L woke him with another demand for a confession. L would give him anywhere between twelve minutes and two hours depending upon how irritated he was at his stubborn refusal to confess to something he no longer knew anything about. By the time the eighteenth day had passed (not that Light knew what day it was, or how to divide his time into days anymore) Light was hallucinating. L had been rather impressed with his fortitude.

Day thirty-six L agreed to give Light the time and the date, if Light could walk from the door to other end of the room. A walk of twelve paces, if that. Light fell four times.

"Thirty six days, six hours, ten minutes. One month, five days. Fifty-two thousand, two hundred and twenty minutes… three million, one hundred and thirty-two thousand and six hundred seconds…"

A glimpse of Light, very pale and very broken, slender figure swathed in clothes that had fitted him perfectly when L arranged for him to become a resident in Rooksgrove. His eyes are empty, there is nothing, not the faintest gleam of the intelligence that L had always known had to be Kira's and couldn't just be Light's.

All this L remembers hunched over the bathroom sink, fingers gripping porcelain, the taste of vomit lingering stubbornly in his mouth.

Every time L goes to see Light he has to fortify himself with more sugar than even he usually eats in a week. That way he can tell himself that his stomach aches and his head swims and his heart thumps painfully against too-tight ribs because of the sugar, not because the sight of Light – arrogant, calculating, charming Light – in such a place, in such a condition, makes him want to close his eyes, to retch, to wish it had all played out some other way.

L doesn't want to die any more than anybody else. But what he's done to Light – his perfect enemy –

He doesn't want to die; he doesn't wish he had. (Truth)

He doesn't want to look at Light like this. (Truth)

He should have killed Light. (Truth)

He wishes he had. (Lie)

––

"Talk to me," L says to the mirror, imagining Light's dead eyes in place of his own.

"Talk to me," he orders.

He tries again, and the words come out gentler but still needling, still with the bitter-bile taste of pleading.

"Stop ignoring me," he says, hears the whine in his voice like a child separated from its favourite toy. It makes him grimace. It feels like giving up one of his aliases unnecessarily, like giving Light something he hadn't quite known how to use before.

He tries again and again, words torn from him, twisted or ripped out like not-quite-ready-to-go milk teeth. He can't think of what to say.

("Will you just _listen to me?_"

"No.")

He lets his head fall forward, press against cold glass. Seven hours from now, Light is staring at him without expression, finally as neutral as he always pretended to be.

"Talk to me." he says to no one at all. "Please."

––

"Back again," the shinigami says the third time he visits. It crouches next to Light, body tangled up in ways that make L nauseous to look at it – the sheer _impossibility_, every human instinct in him recoils at the sight, and the fact that Light doesn't even blink makes it all so much worse. He doesn't want to think about how long it must have been following Light for him to be so acclimatised to its presence.

It is the first time it has spoken to L, rather than simply looking at him like it was trying to figure out how he was put together. He gets the feeling that if it were human it would glare, filled with loathing for what L has done to its entertainment. But since it is a shinigami, it only looks at him. There will never be a human to make it hate. L wishes for that kind of distance.

Ryuk, Light called it, without even a flicker of disquiet. _Ryuk_, without honorific, without detachment, with an absurd kind of intimacy – _this is Ryuk_, like he was introducing a friend from school. L hated that.

Ryuk smiles. Or at least, he shows all his teeth. "L…" he says. "Lawliet," he says, tastes the name L has never heard spoken before, pronounces it like the syllables are bones he can crack between his teeth. L glances at Light automatically, but he doesn't stir, gives no sign he knows L is there or that the shinigami has spoken. It's almost as disappointing as the anticlimax of Kira's great chess game. _Don't you want it? _He wants to ask. _You fought so hard to find it; it meant more to you than it ever did to me._

Light stares through him, his indifference so wrong L can't put it into words. He has a new scar trailing across his neck, like someone wanted it to look like he'd had his throat slit. L knows the amount of care that had to have been taken to make sure it only _looked_ like that.

Ryuk notices his gaze, laughs – it's a hideous noise, why it makes Light relax infinitesimally L will never know – and runs one sharp claw _exactly_ across the mark in Light's skin. He makes a noise as he does it, like a child does when it wants to intimidate friends with the threat of cutting off their heads.

L is still and silent. It might be fury that chokes him.

The shinigami grins, wriggles its fingers carelessly at him before circling Light's throat with its hand, claws sliding over skin hard enough to make it whiten, not quite enough to make it split. L moves forward, though quite what he intends, he cannot say – and it lifts its hand and pats Light's hair like he's a favoured pet. "Such big dreams, such a grand mess," it says, smile so wide it has to hurt. "Such _fun_. Don't you agree?"

L thinks of all the things he would say if the shinigami were human – then the absurdity of that idea catches up to him and he says nothing at all, simply glares and hates and watches as Ryuk hums tuneless songs and strokes Light's unresponsive face.

He turns away.

"I'd like to play tennis with you again," Light says.

L whirls around so fast he almost falls, stares at Light, who doesn't blink, doesn't move, doesn't – doesn't smile. _Oh_, L thinks blankly, an inkling of suspicion making itself known from beneath the memory of Light's expression when he said those words, something soft and gentle and amused. Probably worthless, but still pleasing in its own empty way, the way all Kira's little attempts to befriend him were.

"Yes, same here," the shinigami answers in L's voice, sound-perfect imitation. "Kira and the second Kira… once we've solved this case and rid the world of them, I'd enjoy that."

"Stop that," L says.

"L," the shinigami says in its own voice, damning. Light smiles fleetingly, so fleetingly L is convinced he's imagined it even as he sees it come into existence. "Game over, time for you to leave, isn't that right?"

"No," L says flatly, seeking Kira in Light's face, seeking the part of Light that could never give L anything less than all his attention. Wasn't this what he wanted – Kira, not Light? Words crawl up L's throat and over his tongue, wriggling like maggots, putrid with stale truth. He swallows them, too used to lying to do anything else.

"Oh? Just what are you going to play with now? It's a bit hard to play tennis here and Light's not home at the moment anyway."

He's learned a lot from Light, this shinigami; he knows where the weak points are and how to use them. Do shinigami have weak points the way humans do? What would make this creature hurt, L wonders.

"Go on," Ryuk encourages. "We'll still be here when you come back. He's not going anywhere; you must know that by now."

L spins on his heel, walks away with head held high to the sound of a shinigami's laughter.

––

L takes case after case after case. Once they might have challenged him. In the wake of Kira they are simple to the point of absurdity. He wonders if they were always so and he chose not to see it, or if perhaps his time hunting Kira, sharpening his mind against Light's has simply made everything appear so. Yet another reason Kira remains like a thorn in his side, a thorn tipped with a slow-moving, slow-acting poison. If L could just bear to remove it he'd be fine. But he can't, so the thorn remains and he is dying slowly—

Watari finds him surrounded by the smashed remnants of his laptop, plastic and metal and wires everywhere and says nothing.

– but nowhere near as slowly or as torturously as Light.

Everything hurts, but it's nothing physical so it must be nothing, just Kira's poison making its presence known once again, just making sure that L knows that even though he's won, he's lost.

One day, he thinks, he must learn how Light manages to turn his every victory into a loss in some way, and every loss on his side into a victory. Then he remembers Light's eyes, and he wonders how long he has before _one day_ turns into _too late_. He wonders why that thought makes him hunch over and press his hands to his eyes, as if to blind himself to the possibility.

He is ill, he says when Watari tries to tempt his appetite with ice cream, feeling Light in his veins, in his heart, stubborn and poisonous, and knowing the only way to be rid of him is to kill him.

He can do that. He's killed Light once before.

("Let me touch it too!")

By the time Higuchi had become the third Kira L had known the Kira case would be the end of him. He has to admit, this was not quite how he imagined it.

––

His fifth visit, it occurs to L to wonder if by giving up Light was asking for help.

––

"Listen," Light said, expression bleak in the half-light L insisted upon working in at night. "I'm trying to tell you something."

L looked at him, wanted to touch him, to see if he would slip through his fingers like some half-remembered dream, he seemed so unreal. Light looked back at him, expression tightened with decision. He opened his mouth to speak.

"Can I touch you?" L wondered out loud. _If I do, will you fade away and make this just a dream, just one possibility among many, nothing solid and irreversible?_

Light froze. A flicker of revulsion crossed his face and was quickly hidden beneath bewilderment and confusion. He pulled back, away from L, into himself – L wondered how he had never noticed how open Light's body language had been towards him after his confinement until he closed off again. "No?" L said, and smiled mockingly, though he could not say whether it was directed at Light or himself.

Light's eyes studied him as intently as they did the Death Note during daylight hours. It looked like an interesting battle was playing out in his head. L wanted to open him up and see the thoughts struggling there.

Everything electronic seemed to flicker, a momentary glitch. Light's expression became closed off and bleak again, his programming recovered, returned to its original point. "Listen," he said. "I'm trying to tell you something."

L wakes up.

––

February the fourteenth the nurses are ridiculously cheerful, wear a heart somewhere on their uniform and pretend with all their might that their jobs are not empty, thankless and soul-destroying. It's like being L.

It is Light's birthday in two weeks. He will be twenty years old.

"What would you like for your birthday?" L asks. He is close enough to touch Light, close enough to be repulsed by him. He is all waxen skin, meandering scars and jutting bones now, something all the more grotesque when L can still remember the way he held himself like a king.

"Apples," the shinigami says, and though L knows there is no point, that the creature will give him more entertainment/information/satisfaction than Light ever will, he does not look away from Light's face.

"You will be twenty by western age reckoning." L says, drops to the floor opposite the human and the shinigami and adopts the crouch Light knows so well. "Still not quite an adult by law in some countries."

The shinigami laughs. L has to admit, there is something amusing in that. "What would you like?" he asks again.

"How about freedom?" suggests the shinigami. "No? How about my property back? I'd love to know what Light'd write next to your name now."

Light lifts his head, meets L's eyes for the first time in three visits, smiles. L presses his hands against his knees to stop himself hitting him.

"I'll bring you a cake," he tells Light, watches his smile vanish.

"He would have been merciful," the shinigami says when L prepares to leave. "He would have killed you."

"He broke the rules," L says, instead of asking what a shinigami thought it knew about _mercy._

"Was it worth this?" the shinigami asks, sounding genuinely curious.

"Yes," L says. ( ... )

––

The first day of November, Light walked into the main investigation room with a piece of paper in his hand. "I have something to tell you," he said.

"Can it wait?" L said, fingers tightening where they held the Death Note, looking at Rem, at the way she looked at Light as if a pattern had been broken.

"No," Light said simply, glanced at Rem, at the notebook – did not look at L. The entire team began to gather, as if summoned by L's desperate wish for them to stay away, give him time to defuse Light's attempt to tell the truth.

Light looked at the Death Note like he was bidding farewell to a dear friend, looked at Rem like he was warning her not to interfere, didn't look at L like he was losing something. "I am Kira," he declared.

The inevitability of it sickened L. He put the notebook down, stretched his hand out and took the piece of paper Light offered. He looked at the shinigami – _this is Ryuk_, like an old friend – looked at (Kira) and wished Li(Kira, Kira _Kira_)ght would remember that he was a liar and a remorseless killer and that honesty should never cross his lips.

_How dare you just _tell me_ like I couldn't figure it out on my own. How dare you take this victory from me. How dare you ruin this._

_Light-kun--_

L wakes up. L wakes up. L wakes up.

––

He stumbles into one of the nurses as he is leaving on the 28th of February, knocks her files out of her hands and scatters them across the floor.

"Forgive me," he says as he helps to gather them up, his hands steady. "I wasn't looking where I was going."

"It's alright," she says, smiling. (Lie. Lie lie _lie_.) "Were you here to visit someone? Visiting hours are nearly over, you know."

"No," L says. "I am not visiting anyone." (Truth)

"My name's Anna," she tells him, and waits patiently for his answer.

"Please call me Light," L says after a long moment, watches her features soften and smile.

"Light, huh?" she says. Her eyes wander over him, studying him in a way that is alien to L but perfectly normal to Light. "Unusual. I like it."

L smiles a polite 'I'm listening' smile that isn't his any more than the way he now stands, one hand in his pocket, shoulders square and body centred to face the person he's speaking to. "Yes," he agrees. He bows, and walks away with Light's casual confident stride.


End file.
